


with some help from johnnie walker red

by thatsparrow



Category: BoJack Horseman
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Season/Series 05 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 18:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16164095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: The moments when he's sober enough to think it over, BoJack usually blames his parents.





	with some help from johnnie walker red

**Author's Note:**

> takes place nebulously towards the end of s5 (after BoJack watches the recording, but before the very end of the season finale)
> 
> title from "miss misery" by elliott smith

The moments when he's sober enough to think it over, BoJack usually blames his parents.

For what? Well, fucking spin the wheel of childhood abuses. He could be talking about the time when he was seven and his parents forgot him in the bathroom of an O'Hare terminal before their connecting flight to Michigan. Baby BoJack sitting next to his Looney Tunes suitcase in a grey-walled break room, sifting through a bag of vending-machine pretzels while some tired airport staffer sorted things out over the phone with his parents. His dad's voice bleeding through the speaker loud enough that the plastic might as well have been pressed to BoJack's ear instead of the raccoon with the TSA badge. _How is it my goddamn fault that the kid's stuck there? Gets his dick caught in the zipper or fucking whatever and you're blaming_ me _for him missing the flight? You shitting me with this? No, Jesus, Bea, shut the fuck up. I'm handling it. Can't you tell I'm fucking handling it?_

Or, hey, what about that time when he was ten and his dad celebrated his first Little League win by fucking one of the moms from the other team behind the snack booth?  Plastic bags of ranch-flavored sunflower seeds and Cracker Jacks rattling around on the shelves as Mr. Father of the Year shook the walls of the aluminum shed with a leggy gecko in a "Team Mom" t-shirt. Some sorry kid in a dust-streaked jersey rounding third base while BoJack's dad— _Oh, yes. God, yes. Oh god, oh fucking god, I'm gonna_ —scored a home run. Afterwards, Butterscotch had barely glanced at the scoreboard as he'd lit up a cigarette, fly half-unzipped and lipstick smeared against his collar, saying, _I'm hungry. Let's get out of here_.

Or maybe BoJack's thinking of the time when he was thirteen, and his mom spent the entirety of her mandatory parent-volunteer hours at the eighth-grade bake sale getting trashed on gin and loudly talking about her embarrassment of a son. Sharing stories with everyone in a thirty-foot radius about the time he'd pissed himself in a tantrum over god-knows-what, or cried like a shit-stained toddler when he'd lost his first tooth, or how he managed to finish kindergarten without making a single friend. _You ever think you brought the wrong one home from the hospital?_ she'd said, slurring her words and knocking over a tray of M &M cookies. _Takes him a little too long to learn how to walk and talk, or doesn't show the barest shred of talent, and you can't help but wonder. Surely this can't be_ my _boy?_ _Surely my son would have been a little more impressive, right? Wouldn't have that weak chin, or extra rolls around the middle like he's prepping for a Michelin Man audition. Did I raise him to be such a useless pussy, or does he get it from the withering sack of sperm that's his father?_

His parents did a number on him from the moment he was fucking born, spending their days torturing each other and meanwhile BoJack caught in the middle like a pinball ricocheting between light-up pieces of emotionally abusive machinery. Practicing their swings on BoJack like he was a warm-up punching bag before the heavyweight main event. Of course that left bruises. They’d knocked around the stuffing inside him enough that of course he was still sifting through the damage in his twenties, and his thirties, and even into his fucking fifties.

Is it really any surprise he turned out the way that he did?

Because when he gets to thinking about it, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to blame his parents for the rest of it, too. Not just the Polaroid moments that weren’t rosy-colored enough to cut it for the scrapbooks—though, Jesus, not like he can imagine either of his parents fucking _scrapbooking_ —but for every sorry piece of his existence. For turning him into, well, _him._ Like instead of sugar and spice and everything nice, they’d mixed him up with extra-strength doses of assholery and anxiety and alcoholism. And that’s just the fucking _A_ ’s. How could he be expected to grow up into any kind of a “good person” when his two supposed role models spent his childhood spitting on his self-esteem and blaming him for everything broken in their lives. It's not his fault, okay? _It's not his fucking fault_. Put any other poor kid in a house with Beatrice and Butterscotch Horseman and they'd have turned out exactly the fucking same.

Really, when you think about it, it's a miracle BoJack is as well-adjusted as he is, given the circumstances. Not like he's cutting the heads off strippers and storing them in his fridge, or stuffing pieces of roadkill into a trendy set of Mason jars filled with formaldehyde, or whatever it is that truly psychotic people do. Not like he's fucking women who look like his mom, or anything. So what if he smokes a pack a day (or two, or ten)? So what if he goes through bottles of vodka the way other people run through cases of Fiji water? He's still alive, isn't he? Made it into his fucking fifties, didn't he? Put it that way, and he's basically overachieving. Bluffed his way into taking the house with an ace-high hand.

If he's some flavor of fucked-up, it's because of his parents. If he isn't a good person ( _shut up, BoJack, there's no fucking "if" about it_ ) it's because he never had the chance to learn how to be better. Be thankful he didn't turn out worse.

Sometimes, though, when he has these thoughts and he's _really_ sober—like, voluntarily read a _New Yorker_ article start-to-finish kind of sober—BoJack hears a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Diane's. In those moments, the voice tells him that it's not okay to shift all the blame to his parents' shoulders and call it a day. It's not okay to decide that he doesn't have to try to be a better person. _You want to be good, BoJack_? the Diane-voice asks, _then you have to work at it. You have to take responsibility for your behavior and your actions._

It's too late for me.

 _It isn't_.

I don't know how to be better. I don't know how to be anything other than _this_.

 _Therapy isn't a bad place to start_.

But the Diane-voice is wrong, because what the fuck's a therapist going to do for him? He's not like the rest of these whiny Hollywoo assholes showing up for their weekly appointment to have someone babysit their feelings, okay? For starters, he doesn't _whine_. He's completely different from all those other coddled losers crying, _boo-hoo, my mommy and daddy didn't love me_ , because, what? Because their parents only hired a stage magician for their sixth birthday instead of the entire circus? Cry me a fucking river.

BoJack's not like all those other pathetic fucks because he knows for a _fact_ that his parents didn't love him. They told him as much to his face, and more than once, too. His mother straightening the tie on that goddamn sailor outfit and blowing cigarette smoke straight into his seven-year-old lungs and saying that no one could ever love anything so pathetic. His dad getting home at the end of the day and pouring himself four fingers of scotch and telling BoJack that he reminds Butterscotch of this wide-eyed rabbit who works in an office down the hall, soft hands and a softer backbone and a dick limper than a wilted carrot. _Get it, BoJack? Because he’s a rabbit. Rabbits love carrots. You get it? You get the fucking joke? Whatever. Anyway, that twitchy-nosed asshole reminds me of you._

He’d heard his parents call him “worthless” more often than they’d read him bedtime stories. His mother’s disdain and his father’s contempt more familiar refrains than “Row, Row, Row Your Boat _”._

_Unlovable. Pathetic._

“Some people look at their lives and say they wouldn’t change a thing. If I could do it over again, I’d have gotten an abortion.”

“Instead of finishing my novel and securing my place in history, I threw away the best years of my life raising you. What a fucking waste.”

BoJack doesn’t need a therapist because he already knows what a therapist would say — his parents didn’t love him, so he looked for love elsewhere. Found something close enough up on stage with applause in his ears and spotlights bright in his eyes. Craved it and chased it through _Horsin’ Around_ until the pressure pushed him to find love in new places. Caramel-colored booze that tasted like honey and shone like gold under his dressing room lights. Almost the same shade as a butterscotch candy.

And then, later, pills. Bitter on his tongue for a moment before everything turned so very sweet. Round tablets that poured out of painkiller bottles or clear Ziploc bags, colored pink and white like that one brand of hard candy he hates. What the fuck are they called again? You know, the ones in the purple cardboard box that taste like fucking licorice and always sat at the bottom of his orange-plastic pumpkin on Halloween until all the good shit with chocolate and caramel was gone. Not Dots, or Mike and Ike's, but something in that family. Less chewy, though — more like biting into a pill-sized jawbreaker. Fucking come on. They were called...fuck, _what_ were they called? Shit. This is gonna bug him.

Doesn't matter. Point is that there were pills, and they reminded BoJack of candy, and he went through them fast enough that they might as well have been candy, too. And then instead of round caplets that rolled around on his dressing room table or rattled in the cupholder of his sedan, it was crushed-up mounds of white powder, divided up and neatened into lines. There were episodes of _Horsin' Around_ from those years that he doesn't even remember filming. Reruns that he caught on TV and felt like he was watching for the first time.

And the therapist would say some rote bullshit like, _and how did that make you feel?_ It made him feel high, Dr. Whomever-the-Fuck — what the shit do you think? He got high, he still got paid, and the fans never stopped loving him. It felt like a fucking win-win-win.

_Is that really true, BoJack?_

Yes, it is. Shut up, Diane.

The Diane-voice doesn't say anything else, but he expected that. Not because he thought Diane would listen to him, but because it's not really Diane at all, and because BoJack's subconscious knows how to filter out the shit that he doesn't want to hear. The imaginary therapist is quiet, too, but therapy's a joke, so. Whatever. Fuck the therapist.

And because both of them are quiet, nobody asks BoJack the hard questions that he doesn't want to answer. Nobody asks, _what about Gina?_ Or, _what about Sarah Lynn?_ Nobody sits him down on a leather-covered chaise lounge (or splits their knuckles across his cheek like he definitely deserves) and asks, _what about the bruises on Gina's neck that took three layers of makeup to cover? What about how fucking_ terrified _she sounded in the recording?_ Nobody shines the bright light of an interrogation lamp in his eyes and asks, _did Mommy and Daddy shove that oxy down your throat, BoJack? Is this their fault, too? You still gonna claim you were downing pills like a game of Hungry Hippos for your fucking "back pain"? Come on, BoJack. Even Hollyhock wasn't naive enough to believe that_.

Maybe someone should, but no one does. Just like no one asks him, _what would have happened to Sarah Lynn's sobriety if you hadn't called her? What if you hadn't dragged her down with you on that self-pitying shitshow of a bender? Don't you think she'd still be alive, BoJack, if she'd never met you? How the fuck do you spin it so that her death doesn't land on your shoulders? What, Mommy and Daddy didn't love you enough and_ that' _s why she's gone? If they'd just spent a few afternoons building forts out of the couch cushions you wouldn't have cared so much about the fucking Oscar? Wouldn't have taken a swan dive into a pool of coke when you didn't get the nomination? Does that work, BoJack? Do you come halfway close to believing it?_

Nobody asks him _, how do you live with yourself given the things that you've done? What do you have to say? What could anybody say, with a history like that?_

Nobody does, but if they did, BoJack would say: it's Good & Plenty.

_What?_

That brand of candy. The licorice ones, colored pink and white, half-melted together at the bottom of a purple cardboard box. Cheap candy aisle shit. What a grandma offers up to her least-favorite of the grandkids. "Good & Plenty".

_That's it, BoJack? That's all you have to say?_

Yeah. That's all.


End file.
